Uncategorized
Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America.
In what used to be Syria’s old Jewish quarter, Bakhour Chamntoub, a 76-year-old tennis-playing bachelor, lives as the last practicing Jew in Syria and the de facto leader of Syria’s six-person-strong Jewish community.
Life has changed for Chamntoub since the highly oppressive Assad Regime fell in December 2024. Under Assad, he and the rest of Syria’s remaining Jews kept a low profile. Now, Chamntoub has become something of a local celebrity.
The Palestinian children in his neighborhood routinely knock on his door asking for tennis balls. One Muslim resident of Damascus said he calls Chamntoub “uncle.” And these days, he regularly hosts reporters, tourists, and academics in his home – something he says would have been impossible under Assad. Members of the Israeli media now call him their “No. 1 Jew,” he said.
When he walks in the street, neighbors greet him warmly. “‘Shalom, boker tov, shabbat shalom,’ everybody says to me!” he shared gleefully during a video conversation from his patio in Damascus.
As Syria seeks sanctions relief, foreign investment, and international legitimacy after decades of dictatorship, outreach to Jews has become a way for the new government to signal its newfound tolerance to the West. And it seems to be working. This week, President Donald Trump announced plans to remove Syria from the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the first time since 1979.
But not everyone is on board. Several Syrian minority groups in the U.S. have been campaigning against lifting the remaining sanctions, fearing the government will persecute minorities once it secures Western support. Their concerns are not unwarranted: there have been several attacks on minority communities since the government’s rise to power, including some reportedly involving Syrian authorities.
A long history of decline
For years, Chamntoub has been the sole caretaker of Jewish life in Syria. He knows which Jewish families once lived in which homes, which of Syria’s 22 synagogues are still standing, and where generations of Syrian Jews are buried.
When a member of the community dies, Chamntoub is responsible for overseeing the burial process. Bodies of Jewish community members are taken to a Muslim burial office to be washed and prepared, before Chamntoub takes them to the Jewish cemetery. There, they are buried, though there are not enough Jews in the country to make a minyan, the minimum quorum of 10 Jewish men required by Jewish law to conduct communal religious services mandated for Jewish burials.
Syria’s Jewish community is among the oldest in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years. At its height, it numbered roughly 100,000 people, with communities concentrated in Aleppo and Damascus, but waves of persecution and political upheaval led to a mass exodus of Jews from Syria. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews faced deadly pogroms and restrictions on emigration under successive Syrian governments. Many who attempted to leave the country were imprisoned, tortured or killed.
In 1992, when then-Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad finally permitted Syrian Jews to emigrate, thousands left en masse for Brooklyn, New Jersey, Israel and Mexico.
Chamntoub, who was born in 1950, witnessed almost every chapter of the community’s decline. He also lived through the reign of Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar al-Assad, a brutal leader who used chemical weapons on his own people to suppress dissent, and oversaw a 14-year-long civil war that resulted in the death of 400,000 Syrians.
In December 2024, Chamntoub found himself in the center of a new chapter of Syrian Jewish history after opposition forces toppled the Assad regime. Leading the charge was Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda member who is now the self-appointed leader of the new Syrian government and trying to prove his days of terrorism are behind him. He dons a suit and goes by his birth name rather than the pseudonym he used during his time in al-Qaeda, al-Jolani. He speaks of making peace with his neighbors (Israel among them), and has expressed interest in bringing exiled Jews back to Syria.
This fall, al-Sharaa met with a group of Syrian American Jews in New York – though they avoided the topic of Israel. He has even appointed a designated official within the government whose job it is to engage with Syrian Jews in the diaspora.
Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the strategy is not new. During the Assad era, Syria’s ambassador to the United States in the early 2000s, Imad Moustapha, cultivated relationships with Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, attending bar mitzvahs and community events in hopes of easing Syria’s isolation.
“The charm campaign by Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, is clearly a continuation of the same strategy,” Landis said.
Indeed, most U.S. sanctions on Syria were lifted in May of 2025, due in part to lobbying in Washington by an American Syrian Jewish organization called the Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation. Its leader Henry Hamra, the nephew of Syria’s last chief rabbi, has been the face of efforts to involve the Jewish diaspora in conversation about Syria’s future.
Through it all, Chamntoub never seriously considered leaving Syria, even as family members emigrated to the U.S. and Israel. He says he never felt like an outsider in the country. He enjoys living in his parents’ home among fruit trees and birds whose songs often drowned out the virtual conversation from his patio. He also enjoys his girlfriends in Syria, whom he says he can’t bear to leave.
He cleans his home for Shabbat every Friday, and prepares a meal to commemorate each Jewish holiday, though he says it is hard to get in the holiday spirit alone.
He also keeps kosher, a Herculean task in Syria. For years, Chamntoub ate a vegetarian diet, relying on a rabbi in Turkey to smuggle him kosher meat from time to time. Then, in 2018, he met a 24-year-old Syrian Jew living in Brooklyn named Joe Jajati.
Jajati was born in Syria and left the country at age 2. His grandfather was the head representative of the Jewish community in Syria and, according to Jajati, met frequently with then-President Assad.
Jajati always hoped to visit his birth country, and decided to make the trip after learning there was a Jewish man who remained there.
“I just wanted to meet him. I wanted to hear what he had to say,” Jajati told me.
The two met in Damascus and connected instantly. “After that, we became like best friends,” said Jajati, who has returned several times over the years, always with a suitcase full of kosher meat for Chamntoub.
After the Assad regime fell, Jajati felt the moment was ripe to change the way Syrians think of Jews, and the way Israelis and Americans view Syria.
‘We don’t represent the radical point of view’
Alongside Chamntoub, Jajati started the Syrian Mosaic Foundation, an organization that hopes to revive Jewish life in Syria and promote a more pluralistic future for the country. Chamntoub heads its Syria branch, working alongside Muslim and Christian staff, including Palestinians.
One of the foundation’s main initiatives is bringing delegations of Jews to Syria under armed government escort. The delegations are intended to foster relationships that were impossible under Assad.
Participants often include reporters and academics, among them David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of The Times of Israel, and Dr. Susanna Heschel, the head of Jewish studies at Dartmouth.
After visiting the University of Damascus, Heschel brought a Syrian exchange student she met there to Dartmouth. She hopes he will be the first of many.
“I want to expose these young [Syrians] to Judaism, Jewish history, Zionism,” she said. “They don’t know anything. How could they? Nobody’s teaching that at the university.”
Jajati says the reason the new Syrian government supports this work is clear. “They want to show, not just the Jews, but the world that, ‘Look, we’re good now, we’re not what people think we are.’”
When the delegations come, they often stay at the Inana Hotel, a complex of homes that once belonged to Joe Jajati’s family. It sat empty for years until it was purchased and turned into a hotel by a Muslim family – a common fate for the property of Jews who fled Syria.
Maysara Al-Zoubi, a Mosaic staff member whose family owns the hotel, said he joined the organization in hopes of helping attract Western investment to Syria.
“You have to give investors a good example that we don’t represent the radical point of view,” he said. “We wanted to wash the image of the radical society, and to give another good image to bring these investors to the country.”
Critical to that, he said through a translator, is the work the Mosaic Foundation is doing to bring Jews back into the fabric of Syrian society.
In March, the organization restored its first synagogue, the El Frenj synagogue in Damascus. Last month, a group worked to clean up the tombstone of Rabbi Nissim Indib, the former head Rabbi of Syria. Indib is best known for having recited the Shema prayer with Israeli spy Eli Cohen before his execution.
With the help of Syria’s new police chief, Mosaic also managed to gain possession of several Jewish artifacts that were stolen and put on the black market in the midst of the chaotic fall of the Assad regime.
And this week, the organization began work to renovate Syria’s main Jewish cemetery.
‘They didn’t have exposure to Jews’
Jajati and Chamntoub also hope to impress upon Syrians a different view of Jews than was forced upon citizens under Assad.
“These people were closed off to the whole world the past few years,” Jajati told me. “They really didn’t have exposure to Jews under the Assad regime.”
Since the new government took power, the economic situation for most Syrians has worsened, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty. During Ramadan, Mosaic distributed hundreds of kilos of meat to non-Jewish residents from Chamntoub’s home in Damascus and at a mosque in Quneitra, the province bordering Israel that has seen repeated Israeli incursions since the Assad regime fell.
Mirna al-Rached, a Christian resident from Damascus, trekked to Chamntoub’s home for assistance.
“Bakhour put the meat neatly and gently in the bag, giving with a very nice smile on his face,” she recalled.
“It breaks the monotonous narrative that we always hear about the Jewish people,” she added. “You don’t know anything about them, except what you hear from the news, you know, the whole image about the Jewish people, about their racism, about wars, all the negative things.”
In April, after a Jewish person was reportedly threatened by a Hezbollah actor in Damascus, Mosaic installed solar-powered lights and cameras in the old Jewish Quarter as a security measure. But Jajati knows the move will benefit non-Jews living in the neighborhood as well. Years of economic collapse and electricity shortages have left many Damascus streets pitch black at night.
Now, the company that installed the lights and cameras for that project has committed to helping the organization rebuild synagogues in Syria.
“That would be the first time someone contributes with us, and it’s a Muslim Syrian company,” said Jajati, who has thus far funded Mosaic’s initiatives himself.
But many in the Syrian Jewish diaspora in the U.S. are skeptical of the engagement.
Mourdi, a member of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn said he remains deeply suspicious of the new government. He asked to be identified only by his first name in case he ever pursues a property claim in Syria.
Mourdi left Syria at 24 and said his family’s home and store, like those of many Syrian Jews, were transferred through fraudulent court proceedings after they fled the country. He believes the only way for the new government to earn the community’s trust is by voiding those transactions and restoring confiscated property.
“They want to show the world that they are close to the Jews, that they want them to come back, but nobody’s gonna come back,” he said.
“You want the Jews back? Make an executive order: Any Jewish property that was sold through the court is unacceptable. And after that, I’m gonna show you, 80% of our community is gonna go back to get their property,” he said.
He pointed to an episode after al-Sharaa took power in December 2024, when the new president reportedly reclaimed his own family’s former home, which had been occupied by another family under the Assad regime.
“This is my family’s house, and we have many memories here, so we’d like it back now,” al-Sharaa reportedly told the occupants before they vacated.
Mourdi said he raised the issue of property restitution with American advocates working with the new government, but never received a response.
“For us, Syria is like somebody who died,” he said. “If you try to wake him up, it’s not gonna work. But some people think, ‘No, we can bring him back.’”
Chamntoub also has reservations. While he welcomes the fact that Jews can once again visit Syria, he worries the government’s outreach will end there.
Jewish property has been seized by the state, he said. And while he is grateful for the greater freedom to express his religion and opinions publicly, he fears the government has little interest in hearing them. He briefly considered running for a seat in Syria’s legislature but ultimately decided it would be pointless.
“If I can’t express my opinions frankly… I’m not interested in being in the assembly,” he said.
Though Chamntoub has become the public face of Syria’s tiny Jewish community, the Syrian government has yet to recognize him in any official capacity.
“Everyone in the world considers me the leader of Syria’s Jewish community,” he added, “except the Syrian government.”
Neither Chamntoub nor Jajati have any delusions that they will manage to bring the Jewish community back to Syria. While Jajati says many American Syrian Jews have told him they’re interested in visiting the country, no one has plans to settle there.
“There’s no Syrian, forget about Jews, there’s no Syrian that is living in America wants to go back to live in Syria,” said Jajati.
“My dream is that it becomes like the Emirates, like Dubai,” he added. “The reality is, I hope it doesn’t become another Libya. All Syrians have to do their part so that we don’t let it get there.”
Chamntoub answered instantly when asked if he thinks the six Jews remaining in Syria will be the last: “For sure.”
After a heavy silence, he burst into laughter and cracked a joke to his translator that he might need to marry all of his girlfriends to change that.
The translator explained: “He said he will have to marry like 10 women at the same time!”
The post Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services
(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.
The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.
“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.
Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”
“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.
While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.
For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”
“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.
The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”
“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.
Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”
“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
The post Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’ appeared first on The Forward.
